Tuesday Foto Funnies

It has been brought to my attention by my luncheon date today that I've been a blogging slacker of late. When the Las Vegas Weekly comes out this week, you'll find out why my mind has been otherwise engaged, but nonetheless I decided I ought to feed the masses, such as they are, with some of those entertaining images I love to collect.

WTF is that atop? Well, in early March, I was hired by a trade publication to cover the Fun Expo, a big confab for the amusement park and family entertainment center -- "FEC" in the lingo -- industry. And one of the seminars I covered was all about throwing better birthday parties. One idea was a game where two teams stuff balloons inside the oversized shirts of the competitors. Here's the other lady:


And here's the whole room learning the importance of mascots and gettin' jiggy wit it:


Not your typical convention, huh? That's where, by the way, I learned of the automated cotton candy machine that made it into this March 26 version of this blog feature.

I had to get directions for David McKee of LVA's Stiffs & Georges blog to come subsitute host for Miles on The Strip a few weeks back. When I went to Google Maps for the LVRocks.Com studio, I saw this:


That little jog that re-aligns Maryland Parkway is called South Rue 13. Ooh la la, huh? How fancy for a run-down area with a truly gross 7 Eleven! I was sure that it was some sort of misprint, but there's also a Rue 13 street sign, too.

Near Rue 13, by the by, I spotted this inventive deployment of Strip junk:


Speaking of Blogger McKee, he's been busy noting that Harrah's Buffet of Buffets deal, at first $29.99, is now $39.99. Some believe Harrah's always planned to jack up the price, but this...


...proves otherwise. You may recall from magician Nathan Burton's appearance on The Strip, a wrap like that costs $25,000 or more. So for the foreseeable future, it seems, Harrah's will have a knowingly out-of-date or misleading billboard on Bally's. Or maybe someone can get out there with a bucket of red paint and fix that "2"? I mean, yeah, it'd ruin the view from a couple of rooms, but they're not selling out anyway, right?

Here's a Google alert I really wish my parents hadn't received:

I stopped in on Harrah's comic-magician Mac King's 10th anniversary-on-the-Strip party on Sunday, as I Tweeted. He's the homespun guy with Coke-bottle glasses who wears plaid suits, so I guess it makes sense that this appears in his living room:

That's Mac. He's funny. He has a syndicated Sunday comic, but the R-J cut their Sunday comics pages to four pages recently and decided the only Vegas-originating cartoon of the lot had to go. Way to support the hometown hero, Shermy!

It was a nice shindig with all the usual. You know, a little person dudded up like Col. Sanders passing out KFC...

...and the likes of Penn Jillette, Rita Rudner, Vinnie Favorito and other fellow Harrahite stars chilling by the blow-up flume:

It's tricky business letting hoards of people into your home, but this works:

On another note, given all my fascination with the taxi life lately, I spotted this and realized that cabbies clearly don't view the Las Vegas Monofail as competition anymore:

Remember how I dropped in on Turnberry Towers a couple weeks ago for a blog post? Well, this is what the lobby looks like...


...and this is what the inside of the elevator I took looked like:


Ain't that fancy?

My two favorite license plates lately:

And finally, when I'm done with big projects or long blog posts, I play a little Scrabble on ISC.ro. And look at what bingo (Scrabble lingo for using all your letters) I got last week:


That enough for ya, Amy? Well, is it? Huh? OK. Time to get get some real bylines now!

As The Turnberrys Turn

Lately the fine folks at Turnberry Towers have been taking out quarter-page ads in the Review-Journal aiming at jumpstarting sales in the second high-rise condo building off Paradise Road just south of Sahara Avenue. They're doing tours from Wednesdays to Saturdays from 7:30-10:30 p.m. so people can fall in love with the night views. Yet I wondered if the ad in particular above could have some serious truth-in-advertising problems with it.

Go on, take a good look. You see what's missing? When I showed this to Miles, his first response was, "Encore." And I hadn't noticed that, but he's right. Which puts this photo of the fabulous views available at TT at about four years old.

But much more importantly, the never-to-be-finished behemoth known as the stalled Fontainebleau isn't there yet. That's important because with the F'bleau in the, uh, picture, whatever little remaining ability to see the Strip. In fact, here's the actual view that TT is now selling:


It's a minor issue, really, but it caught my eye. They're advertising "million-dollar views" when the views have changed since they were going for a million dollars and the imagery doesn't account for that.

That said, I did go off to check it out last night after a lovely dinner with fill-in co-host David McKee of the Stiffs & Georges blog and his girlfriend, Jennifer, the yummy, underrated Cafe Heidelberg. And while the advertisement might be a little off, even the blocked view is pretty and the prices are, undeniably ridiculous.

Turnberry Towers was the second act of Turnberry Associates, who built the successful Turnberry Place set of towers that sparked the ill-fated Strip high-rise building boom. The first tower was finished in 2007 and nearly sold out, but the second tower was done by late 2008 and the developer went bust the next year and the whole project ended up controlled by Prudential Financial.

Now they're having a fire sale. The fellow last night showed me the units and they're impressive, especially at these ridiculous prices.

This is the 6th floor 1-bedroom, which has 814 square feet. The same unit in the first tower sold for $575,000. This one can be yours for...


...$225,000. Likewise, a 32nd floor 1,405-square-foot 2-bedroom that sold in the first tower for $740,000 is now on the market in the second tower for $300,000.

Of course, I'm so over-leveraged with my own worthless investment properties that all I could do was marvel and privately sulk. Well, that and...


have some chicken on a stick. Sigh.